I’m not saying the pilot of the Aerolineas Argentinas Airbus was texting while parking last night—you know how we amp the iPhone on landing—I’m just saying you’ve got two pilots with more onboard-computer power than Apollo 11, who wing it from Buenos Aires to Miami and then have a wingtip-tail-section bender at the gate with Air France 777. It makes you want to find out why.

The thing is, safety records are so one-dimensional. You go x number of years without a crash and you’re top shelf. But screw up once, your safety record is toast. There’s no unified theory of safety, but a European agency has named Finnair the world’s safest airline.

A USA Today headline asks how many air traffic controllers handle each cross-country flight, say from LAX to JFK. Handoffs happen all over the map. Controllers carve out slices of space and/or time and leave behind jet-fuel smelling backwash. There are plans to improve traffic control with fewer controllers. Plans to save millions by spending billions.

“Hey, girlie, are you smiling at that full-body scanner or are you just hoping for a pat down? You, big boy, you come here often? All the security lines in all the airports in the world and you walk up to this one.” TSA officers have a new high-tech tool beyond the logic of computers and about as clever as a mousetrap. They call it “managed inclusion.” We call it small talk.